It's never a pretty sight when the behaviors of subcultures are suddenly isolated and thrust into a harsh, public spotlight. In such cases, context matters, right? What's fair for climate scientists should also be for combat soldiers, right? So casting aside whatever opinion you might have of Climategate, let's say Steve Easterbrook is correct when he asserts that
the worst that can be said about the CRU emails is that the scientists sometimes come across as rude or dismissive, and say things in the emails that really aren't very nice. However, the personal email messages between senior academics in any field are frequently not very nice. We tend to be very blunt about what appears to us as ignorance, and intolerant of anything that wastes our time, or distracts us from our work.
In other words, this is the way we are. Evidently, William Connolley can't fathom the way "trigger-happy ...
